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Pediatric Long COVID Subphenotypes: An EHR-based study from the RECOVER program
Journal article   Open access   Peer reviewed

Pediatric Long COVID Subphenotypes: An EHR-based study from the RECOVER program

Vitaly Lorman, L Charles Bailey, Xing Song, Suchitra Rao, Mady Hornig, Levon Utidjian, Hanieh Razzaghi, Asuncion Mejias, John Erik Leikauf, Seuli Bose Brill, …
PLOS digital health, Vol.4(4), e0000747
04/2025
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pdig.0000747
PMCID: PMC11984710
PMID: 40208885
url
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pdig.0000747View
Published (Version of record) Open Access

Abstract

Pediatric Long COVID has been associated with a wide variety of symptoms, conditions, and organ systems, but distinct clinical presentations, or subphenotypes, are still being elucidated. In this exploratory analysis, we identified a cohort of pediatric (age <21) patients with evidence of Long COVID and no pre-existing complex chronic conditions using electronic health record data from 38 institutions and used an unsupervised machine learning-based approach to identify subphenotypes. Our method, an extension of the Phe2Vec algorithm, uses tens of thousands of clinical concepts from multiple domains to represent patients' clinical histories to then identify groups of patients with similar presentations. The results indicate that cardiorespiratory presentations are most common (present in 54% of patients) followed by subphenotypes marked (in decreasing order of frequency) by musculoskeletal pain, neuropsychiatric conditions, gastrointestinal symptoms, headache, and fatigue.

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